Jonas Beckman

I’m off for a short trip to Iceland tomorrow, on a small winter conference with my employer. Unlike our last trip to Thailand (where I led an intense workshop), I’m not responsible for any arrangements on this one. All I have to do is enjoy the ride – and I will!

It’s dark, cold and the snow has just barely turned into drizzling rain. Nothing happens, really: work, some swimming, buying small things, talking to friends, having coffe etc, etc.

And yet I had a very good day today. I feel good about almost everyone I talked to today, from some of my oldest friends to clerks in shops. No need to figure out how to handle things I don’t know and can’t control – I’ll just do what I want to as best as I can. And let things happen slow when necessary.

I think about people I have hurt and people I love – too often they have been the same. I remember what it was like to be surprised by someone’s good intentions. I feel old wounds and recent loss. And I realize that everyone else is hurting and trying to love, too.

2000 meter medley

Two colleagues held an evening tech lecture about building the largest deployed DotNet application in Europe. Overall they were surprisingly positive. The only thing they really hated was the integration with Visual SourceSafe, which was buggy and unreliable.

They showed us code. Easy too produce working solutions, but very tools-driven. What would would it be like in really inexperienced hands? Remember the old quote about MS tools as Soviet-style programming. Well, as Greg Franklin noted, sometimes that works. It may… gasp… even be the right thing to do in some circumstances.

Since I was offline being thoughtful for a good part of the day, I missed the official release of Visual Studio .Net. But my colleagues told me they had a smooth download from MSDN until all the Americans woke up. Sometimes living in GMT+1 is nice.

Lots of fun – we’re having a short break in our seminar now. I introduced some concepts and tools before lunch – pretty much the same things I wrote about yesterday.
It’s a small and very competent team and we are in that sweet initial phase where everything looks simple. That won’t last, of course.

Dave Winer knew we were waiting for an easy way to connect Radio Userland to Manila. And today he delivered!

Below is my Hello World of weblog mirroring. Naturally, some people are already far more advanced.

{viewRssBox (“http://radio.weblogs.com/0100211/categories/manilaMirror/rss.xml”, boxTitle:”Mirrored from RU”, align:”", width:infinity, timeZone:”PST”)}

The bulleted text above was written somewhere else and automatically added here.

Still awake, still feverish but not quite so sad anymore. Aila is asleep, now. Maybe dreaming of more fun in the jungle?

Not so early morning, today. Late breakfast, then off to my family for some julgransplundring. We didn’t really want to go anywhere today, but it was fun anyway.

2000 meter medley

Aila’s fish-soup deluxe.

Getting back to Radio 8. Hal asks himself the same question I do: how far do I want to dive in?

My earlier attempts at working with Radio were, in the end, abandoned for the simple pleasure of clicking my EditThisPage button. This time I may do it, if there is a reasonably simple way to either convert this site or somehow synchronize posts here and on my my radio weblog.

Garret had bad dreams about the RU mugs – maybe he wil make some beautiful themes so the mugs go away.

I should change mine right now. But there are several templates to edit and I don’t want to handcode them all. Hmm… Radio does have macros and a hierarchy of templates. But that hierachy finds one template and uses it, there is no built-in visual inheritance mechanism. Like Dave Winer says, it’s an open architecture – which unfortunately means I may have to do some work myself

There is a great Weblogging and Content Management Linkfest at SkippingDotNet. I especially liked the part about not replacing Manila with something else just because. SkippingDotNet is written by a very pragmatic MS developer. Worth reading if you are plan on actually using alternatives to MS software. Link via DiveIntoMark

Greg Franklin is off to a good start this year: lots of good writing and useful linking over at FlyingChihuahuas.

Dan Gillmor writes about the Google effect. If anyone reading this isn’t already using Google a lot – please start now. I am already starting to forget what the Net felt like without it.

If you use Internet Explorer a lot, install the Google toolbar. Or start using Opera, which already has it. I have used Opera daily for many months now.

Sleepless, almost morning. I feel strong and healthy again – but there is something deep, dark and beautiful I know how to share. And I don’t.

The snow is melting, it’s warmer again. Dark outside, very early in the morning – I just woke up.

First thing I did today was to install Radio Userland 8.0 and start a Radio weblog – we’ll see where it goes. So far it doesn’t work.

Update: I’m up and running now! An old RU installation wasn’t completely gone. The solution came via email from Lawrence Lee AND in this thread in the RU Discussion group. Talk about excellent support! And I just bought Radio – I’ll be around to watch this thing grow.

Me and Aila went for a walk and a very nice afternoon meal with an old friend of ours. She is a great person, a succesful freelance journalist and beautiful, too. We had a long interesting talk about family, friends, relationships etc. Friends are a blessing – we probably wouldn’t have gone out at all today if she hadn’t called.

On our way home we met our favorite dog Tintin and took him for a long walk. Unfortunately, I was starting to freeze again and by the time I got home I had lots of fever and fell asleep. I’m better now, but still a little hot.

But what’s a little fever? We can always go over to my place and have some fun in the djungle.

Some days are like that: you feel the power and the sadness.

But swimming was good. Doing a little work was good. And giving Aila a massage for her lower back was good. Onward…

I’m thinking about the kind of tools you need for a RUP/XP kind of workflow – we’ll talk about that at a small seminar next week. Things like continuous integration, unit tests, debugging tools, tools for sucking diagrams out of existing code and refactoring …

Slept well, had a good driving lesson, visited a satisfied customer, went down to the office, did some research, planned fun things for the near future… and then dinner at Aila’s place. Sometimes life is good!

Still thoughtful but in a good way: things get done and reflected on.